Moscow State University’s main building at night. Owen Yager photo.
On the top floor of Moscow State University’s main building, a 790 foot Stalinist behemoth, sits the Earth Science Museum at Moscow State University (Muzei Zemlevedeniya MGU, in Russian). I realize, as I walked around the museum, how odd it was be looking at something as viscerally terrestrial as a collection of rocks while suspended in the sky, but I forgot about that when I looked out over the city. To the West, the university’s library, a burly white and gold building, sits squarely in front of the Soviet apartment blocks that make up one of Moscow’s endless neighborhoods. To the East stretches Moscow. A long promenade, snowed over until the last few days, reached from my feet, or the building’s, to the edge of the Moscow River’s closest curve. Its end points to, just above the opposite bank, the stadium where the finals of this summer’s World Cup will be played. Beyond that, the city expands. To the left of my view stood skyscrapers of the new business district, called Moscow City. A picture of that skyline could be captioned as one of London or Beijing or New York or Minneapolis and no one would never notice the difference. It’s the right half of the view, ensconced by the river, that matters. The city there is a collage of new buildings, old buildings, and new buildings that are supposed to look like old buildings. Bits of refracted light mark the domes of the Kremlin and the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Looking out from that top floor, it was clear to me that the university at which I was studying was in a city with a capital C.
Moscow State University’s library, seen from the main building’s top floor. Owen Yager photo.
Looking towards the center of Moscow from the top floor of Moscow State University’s main building. Owen Yager photo.
This city is a far cry from Northfield, with a river splitting which small college’s turf you’re on and visible stars, and it’s the cities that set this experience apart from our other eleven terms at Carleton. Inside each, though, Carleton and MGU don’t feel that dissimilar: each is, for all of the differences that other posts on this page have outlined, still a college. Here, as at Carleton, students can live in dorms and can eat at dining halls. There are academic buildings and athletic complexes, administrative offices and residential areas. The campuses both have their well kept green spaces and, I presume, both explode into bloom in late April. We have an urban iteration of the Carleton Arb as well, a set of trails that run down through a little strip of forest to the banks of the Moscow River.
The collegiate differences that do exist mostly seem to stem from our environs – here, the city surrounding us extends a constant invitation to partake in it, whether by wandering through the Kitai-Gorod neighborhood or nestling into one of the cafes that seem to sit on every corner in the city. At Carleton, students partake of the realities of Northfield, whether by working at schools or getting a Friday night burrito at El Tri, but the bulk of our lives, or at least mine, is limited to the range between the Weitz and the banks of the Cannon as it weaves through the Lower Arb. Here, though, we’re all finding the city to be a classroom and a social epicenter; a constant stimulus; a source of physical, mental and emotional engagement that is begging to be explored more.
